Long lost paper offers readers F. Scott Fitzgerald’s must-read list

F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for such classics as 'The Great Gatsby' and 'This Side of Paradise.' (AP)

Who needs Oprah?

None other than F. Scott Fitzgerald reportedly concocted an undiscovered syllabus of 22 must-read books four years before his death, dictating it to a nurse assigned to save him from his impending dissolution.

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SUMMARY

• Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser
• The Life of Jesus, by Ernest Renan
• A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen
• Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
• The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett
• The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiel Hammett
• The Red and the Black, by Stendahl
• The Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant, translated by Michael Monahan
• An Outline of Abnormal Psychology, edited by Gardner Murphy
• The Stories of Anton Chekhov, edited by Robert N. Linscott
• The Best American Humorous Short Stories, edited by Alexander Jessup
• Victory, by Joseph Conrad
• The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France
• The Plays of Oscar Wilde
• Sanctuary, by William Faulkner
• Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust
• The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust
• Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust
• South Wind, by Norman Douglas
• The Garden Party, by Katherine Mansfield
• War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

Widely considered one America's greatest writers of the 20th Century and the author of the "Great Gatsby," Fitzgerald enumerated the essential books in a sort-of attempt at tutoring Dorothy Richardson, according to OpenCulture.com.

Richardson, a nurse assigned to squire Fitzgerald back to sobriety by a North Carolina hotel at which he was boarding, scribbled the list on a piece of paper, a photograph of which OpenCulture.com published to their site on Friday.

Fitzgerald died in late-1940, after a more-than-decade-long battle with alcoholism. He reportedly suffered two heart attacks prior to his death, and claimed to suffer from a mild bout of tuberculosis.

At the top of the scribbled page, Richardson writes “These are books that Scott thought should be required reading.”